Galileo Begins Sending Data from SL9 Impacts

Galileo Begins Sending Data from SL9 Impacts

The Galileo spacecraft has begun a six-month process of
radioing to Earth data taken during the collisions of Comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter in July.

From its vantage point in space en route to Jupiter, Galileo
had the only direct view of the collisions of comet fragments on
the dark side of the giant planet July 16-22.

Galileo stored observational data on its onboard tape recorder
and is transmitting them to Earth via its low-gain antenna over
several months.

Ground controllers initially instructed Galileo to send back
"jail-bar" image strips--narrow slices of various portions of data--
to help them search for the most promising observations on the
spacecraft's tape recorder.

Preliminary looks at "jail-bar" data recently sent to Earth of
the impact of the comet's fragment K led scientists to confirm
detection of an intense burst of light lasting about 40 seconds.
These data are from a special image frame that was deliberately
smeared during a time exposure to form a streak from Jupiter and
another from the impact flare, providing high resolution in time
and brightness.

More data from the K event will be sent to Earth in October.

Other data still stored onboard the spacecraft include images
of the fragment W impact; mission scientists do not yet know
whether the actual impact was captured on these frames. A small
portion of the fragment W data will be sent to Earth in mid-August
and late September; the rest is scheduled to be received in
January.

Data from the fragment G impact were taken with Galileo's
ultraviolet spectrometer, the infrared mapping spectrometer and
the photopolarimeter. These data will be returned starting in late
September and continuing through December.

Galileo data primarily of interest to scientists and amateur
astronomers will be posted on an ongoing basis on Internet via the
World Wide Web system. This may be accessed by the public from
JPL's home page, at the address http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ under the
"News" heading.